This was the debut novel of Kingsley Amis, father of Martin Amis, author of science fiction study New Maps of Hell (1960, UK) and the sf-adjacent The Alteration (1976, UK), and a writer I don’t normally read, even though I do read several post-war British writers… And it turns out I’ve actually read a few novels by Amis previously, including the aforementioned The Alteration, plus The Old Devils (1986, UK) and Jake’s Thing (1978, UK). Lucky Jim (1954, UK) is a novel that has been on my radar for a long time, although I’ve never actively sought it out to read – although I did watch the movie adaptation once.

Anyway, it popped up for 99p on a certain near-monopolistic seller of ebooks, so I clicked on the buy button, and here we are. It is, like many debut novels by British authors from the first half of last century, partly inspired by the author’s own life. And that of Philip Larkin, a friend and mentor, who I always think wrote The Darling Buds of May (1958, UK), turned into an execrable TV series in the early 1990s, but that was by HE Bates, and the name of the family in it was Larkin. Philip Larkin is perhaps best-known these days for the poem ‘This Be the Verse’, which memorably opens with the line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”… 

Jim Dixon has just started as a junior lecturer in history at a provincial university. He is fairly sure his department head, Professor Welch, doesn’t like him; and he’s worried his job is not secure. He’s been seeing a fellow lecturer, Margaret, who is a sort of 1950s male-stereotype “neurotic” woman. Things go from bad to worse when Welch’s artist son turns up for a weekend stay, with nubile girlfriend Christine in tow. Dixon is attracted to Christine; Betrand is unhappy about this. Betrand is also an ass (and even an arse). Christine, incidentally, is only eighteen (or perhaps nineteen), and Dixon in his mid-twenties; but her youth is more or less ignored.

There are several comic set-pieces, most of which are amusing. Dixon manages to poison his own prospects, but in the process becomes closer to Christine. The final showdown, so to speak, is a lecture on “Merrie England” given by Dixon to the university and town’s great and good. Unfortunately, for various reasons, Dixon is very drunk. Unfortunately, because Amis put a lot of effort into the run-up to this lecture, it’s not a very funny piece of writing. Amis tries to avoid the specific, but that’s where humour lies.

Happily, Dixon lives up to the book’s title, and gets both a new career and the girl. Neither feel deserved, but that may be the point. After painting academia as populated chiefly by incompetents and martinets, Dixon, who is allegedly neither, eventually has his escape handed to him. There’s a hint of criticism of the snobbery against “provincial” universities – in my day, there was Oxbridge, the red brick universities, and way way down the pecking order, the polytechnics (I went to a polytechnic, although it was a university when I graduated). But expecting a British novel (especially of the first half of the twentieth century) not to feature class and snobbery is like expecting an American novel not to feature chattel slavery.

Lucky Jim was a fun read and, yes, better than the film adaptation. I will not be dashing out to buy more novels by Kingsley Amis, however. I know which post-war British writers I like, and he is not on that list.